Slippery When Wet is S. H. Murakoshi's sometimes delicate,
sometimes passionate and often explosive dance of
relationship-negotiation between an Asian-American woman and an
African-American man. Under the superb direction and choreography of
award-winning Ching Valdes-Aran, Penumbra Theatre's production is
charged with sensuality, old taboos and mesmerizing beauty.

The set, designed by Valdes-Aran and Jason Allyn Schwerin, gives the
initial hint that audiences are in for something particular. A
dramatic white diamond of flooring overlays the stage and is reflected
in the tilted mirror that forms the backdrop. Otherwise, there are few
props, just two white boxes and a white stand for a vase of flowers.
The mirror reflects every action on stage, so it serves to
reflect and reinforce the background of racial prejudices that the two
characters lug around with them.

We tend to think of prejudice as being the sole province of white
Americans, but Murakoshi's play shatters that myth.

Slippery When Wet looks at an intense attraction between two
accomplished young people. Helen (Katrina Toshiko) is a third-generation Japanese-American and an aspiring actor and writer. Rakim
(Desean Terry) is a successful black filmmaker. The play is their
first date in her apartment on a night when the city is locked in
blinding snow.

The attraction between them feels both electric and tender. The
relationship hums with potential for consummation, but the characters'
spoken asides to the audience reveal the fuse-breakers that threaten
their togetherness. "They're full of shame," and "A black man is a
sexual machine," thinks Helen. "Three thousand years of sexual
repression," thinks Rakim.

Internal thoughts break through the action frequently, often to
humorous affect. The other actor freezes, and Mark Dougherty's
masterly light design combines with Martin Gwinup's video projections
to make it crystal clear that for a moment we are witnessing the inner
life.

Katrina Toshiko opens the play dressed in a red kimono, speaking
and moving in the manner of stylized Japanese Noh theater. But she
stubs her toe and emits an essentially American "Shit!" Without the
kimono, she appears all-American in a brief tank top and hip-slung
jeans. Toshiko captures Helen's longing for Rakim, and her hesitation;
she positively squirms with toe-curling desire. But she is blocked by
her family's history of WW II internment and an association of her
mother's early death with "coloreds." Helen grew up in the briar patch
of her grandmother's biases.

Rakim carries his own lineage of insecurities, anger and
stereotypes. Desean Terry lives sensitive Rakim, an intelligent,
thoughtful but prickly young man, who succeeds in a world that
routinely judges him according to racial stereotype.

In a scene, white hot with eroticism, Helen strips off her top and
surrenders to her longing for Rakim, only to pull away in self-horror
moments later.

Seared by the force of frustrated love, they fall into
Valdes-Aran's choreography of magnetic exorcism, as they hurl abuse at
each other in a dance still informed by desire: "We should've nuked
all you Japs;" "Niggers and flies, I despise." The play ends with the
possibility of hope.

This fascinating multi-media production accomplishes much with
little, under Valdes-Aran's gifted direction. In a composition designed
by Fred Carl, on-stage percussionist Marc Anderson pings bowls,
rattles a grater, pours water from a jug and rips cloth to create
sound effects that coincide with emotions. When Helen opens an
imagined window to drop her door key into the street for Rakim,
Anderson tosses a key on stage. Like projected stereotypes, Gwinup's
video projects onto the characters, as well as onto the back mirror.

Murakoshi's script sometimes sings with lyricism, sometimes cuts
back to poetic leanness and, in a play about identity, it brings into
glancing focus the crisis of national identity in the face of prisoner
abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.